I bought a dream-machine on ebay: an SGI Indy R5000. OK so realistically, it's a 10th as powerful as my Athlon XP at home in virtually every way, but you know. It's seriously cool.

IRIX wasn't totally there any more (/usr was NFS mounted...) so I decided to install Debian. After all "everyone" says how great it is and stuff. Especially "apt" and how great Debian is at dependencies.

This is complete bollocks.

I'll skip over the Red Hat 4.x installer and less-than-useful X configuration tools (I did it by hand in the end). Everyone knows about Debian's installer and that it needs changing (but only if you're not as 133t as all Debian users :-). Anaconda rocks - no more whining Debian drones, just do it.

So apt is all singing all dancing is it? Well Debian had it before Red Hat had up2date (and apt :-). Dependencies never a problem? (Not that they have been on Red Hat since 7.2 but Debian bores can't cope with the truth).

Well let me tell you this: it is very easy to completely F*ck over a Debian box. Why? Because apt doesn't check disk space for you before the whole install takes place and so bombs out half way through with an inconsistent set of libraries.

Debian sucks. I'll probably try to re-install it (something I've NEVER had to do on any version of Unix/Linux).